2nd, and my first DNF

Well, the day had to come when I had to retire a race for the first time with the Cooper S. Fortunately, I had one good result, and I had loads of fun – and the reason for retirement was a LF wheel bearing dying in spectacular fashion.
Rudskogen hosted two rounds of the Nordic Cup, and these were both run on a hectic schedule as we had qual and both races on Saturday. The car felt decent in qualifying, but a bit too understeery on power for my taste. Vegar came along as a mechanic, and we decided to stiffen up the rear ARB and change some pressures for the races to see if that could help. And it did, the car was much more to my liking, but still lacked front end grip. Probably as a Mini should on a track like this.

With my laptimes I am not too far off Ed’s record, and I’m confident that with a visit to a rolling road, some setup experimenting and some driver improvement I could be giving the best guys a fight. In the 65 cars that is. Lars Kristian Ekorness is flying in his Marcos these days, and he is actually fighting for outright victory. Very impressive!

I fell asleep on the rolling start of the first race, and had to fight my way back past a couple of cars. From then on in it was just a matter of saving the car really. But it was still a load of fun! I had onboard camera in this race, will be fun to watch!

For the 2nd race I was more alert and made a demon start, I was at one point up between the big boys, but everything sorted itself out nicely for the first few turns. I got a nice scrap started with my friend Morten in his Alfa, and we had a few laps of hard chasing. But suddenly my brake pedal went to the floor. I could pump it back up, but as soon as I turned the wheel, there was no brakes. I tried to keep it going, but then there was smoke and noise, and I realized my LF bearing had died, so I brought the car slowly to the pits and retired. The irony is, of course, that I changed the bearing on the other side before this race…should have done ’em both!

Back at home, I have also found a leaky “#¤¤#%#¤ H4 carb again. ARGH. What do I need to do to stop them blowing gaskets? Are they really this useless I wonder?

Felix got to see racing for the first time, and he was over the moon with joy. Grandma & pa kept him safely harnessed as he gave them a running commentary of the events. Våler up again in 4 weeks, see you there?